Onion Skin Transparency?

[NealF]

Changing to a lighter color does it for me. I don't see a way to change the transparency in the onions menu, but this would work fine.

Doesn't look like you have the option in my older Moho Pro 12.5. But 14 has it.

Thanks all.

[sang820]

I'm not sure silhouettes would be useful, but we could definitely use onionskin for selected shapes only just like we have for select layers. That would allow more isolation within a layer to cut down the clutter.

Yes, I believe many people are looking forward to such onion skins~!

[Whitebbwolf]

that is a critical understatement. when i try the first onion skin seems to set to 100% opacity and its REALLY REALLY detrimental to drawing keys quickly

[Greenlaw]

FWIW, some tips:

Onion skin always looks transparent here. For example...



In this case, my onion skin frames are spaced on twos, but that's because I'm drawing the FBF on twos.

I'm also using the Selected Layer Only option, which can filter out everything else in the project from the onion skin. In the above example, I have only the FBF layer selected.

Additionally, I have Colored Fills disabled. This is option is useful for identifying before and after frames, but it can also darken the image. I don't usually find it necessary when drawing FBF, so I disable it. When I do use Colored FIlls, I use the desaturated colors seen in the image. (I'm not sure if these colors are default. They could be.)

Occasionally, I like using Outlines Only or Draw Behind modes. This is completely situational, but they can be very helpful in the right situations.

I almost never use Onion Skin when animating a rigged puppet, at least not when the character isn't moving around the environment very much (like 'the Artist' character in our tutorial videos.) I might enable it when the character is extra active, like when fighting, performing acrobatic motions, or dancing, but most of the time, it's unnecessary for puppet animations. For example, in Space Tommy: Mission Critical, I probably used Onion Skin only in the scene where he captures the golden asteroid. I did use Onion Skin for the two explosions, but those were Moho FBF, not puppets.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, yeah, one more thing:

I mentioned using Selected Layer Only to filter out everything else, but sometimes it's easier to simply hide everything else. I typically use Layer Comps in a project to render passes for compositing in Ae or Fusion, but I also use this feature to hide and reveal backgrounds, props and characters individually to make a scene easier to animate. This can help when using Onion Skin too.

When using Layer Comps this way, be sure to create a 'master' layer comp so you can quickly reset a view.

Ok, that's my 'tip for the day'. I need to get to get back to finishing our next tutorial video.